Hagar Read online

  The house, like Belle Jour, was long and low in the Carribean style. Someone had broken out the French doors of the burning room, but backed away from the heat of the blaze; buckets of water were hurled around and past the would-be rescuer as Rose and the men pounded up the gallery steps. A young woman in a night-rail, black curls tumbled over her shoulders, sobbed, “I tried to get to her, when first I smelled the smoke. The fire’s in her room, sir, I couldn’t get near. I did try!” Tears ran down her face.

  Mohammad LePas the blacksmith grabbed the next bucket to come down the line and dumped it over his own head. The flames within the room were already sinking. Rose seized another vessel and did the same, and more water was thrown through the French doors into the room: curious, she thought, how the common foe of fire will cause men to work together.

  Even more curious – Rose watched the flame with narrowed eyes – how ferociously and how suddenly the fire had taken hold. “What will I say to Michie Jèrôme when he comes home?” wailed the night-gowned young maidservant. “My poor Madame—”

  Arnaud Levesque kicked through the last remains of the door.

  The room within was – as Rose had already glimpsed – surprisingly little damaged. That was Rose’s second impression, as the torchlight flared up behind her and the stench of burned wood, charred wool, and the horrible sickly odor of roasted flesh filled her nostrils like dirty water.

  Her first impression, momentary but very strong, was of two other smells that she recognized at once from the simplest chemical experiments she had taught her students when she’d had the school.

  One of them was the characteristic garlic smell of nitre.

  The other was the rotten-egg stink of sulpher.

  Long before she’d taught school she’d known them – from her work making fireworks for the New Orleans Opera.

  The maidservant gave a cry of despair and staggered, covering her eyes. “Madame! Oh, Madame!” Arnaud began to lead her away, and from the ground below Rose heard the clatter of hooves, and someone shouting, “Lieutenant Parton, sir!”

  White militia.

  The slave-patrol, probably – whoever got the short straw on the night of Andrew Jackson’s birthday celebration…

  Superheated air burning her cheeks like a bake-oven, Rose walked over to the charred horror of the bed.

  A man behind her in shirtsleeves and the good wool trousers of a house-servant held his torch high. “That’s the dress she had on earlier this evenin’, m’am. Sir,” he added, since Fortune Gerard and Mohammed LePas had joined her.

  Gerard gasped, “Dear God!” and crossed himself, but the blacksmith said,

  “What was that mattress stuffed with?”

  Rose had been wondering that herself.

  The pillow, at least, had been stuffed with goose down, as the stench of burned feathers amply attested. It was just as well, she reflected, that Leonie Neuville had lain down still dressed on her bed, and that some of her long, red hair remained. Her face was a charred horror, and by the look of her hands she must have tried to strike out the flame once it had taken hold.

  Yet in that case, why didn’t she try to flee the room?

  And her hands weren’t anywhere near her face. Nor near the smouldering ashes of the pillow.

  Arnaud Levesque came striding back in, instants ahead of a stockily-built white man in the coarse garb and an ill-fitting military jacket. A shade more emphatically than he’d have spoken to a man of his own class, Arnaud announced, “Lieutenant Parton, may I introduce you to some of my guests this evening. Madame Janvier, M’sieu Gerard, M’sieu LePas, all of New Orleans.”

  Lieutenant Parton scowled, but replied, “Well, maybe you-all better tell your guests that the excitement’s all done here, Mr. Levesque. We’d be best served if they’d take themselves back to your place. Good Lord,” he added, turning toward the bed. “Jesus Christ, what a sorry business! Frank, bring up that torch—”

  He winced, and drew back from the stench, and the ghastly thing that the better light revealed. Then he frowned sharply, and said, “An’ she just laid there while all this was goin’ on?” Indeed – as Rose herself had observed – neither the woman’s gray-and-lavender dress, nor the light blankets upon which she lay, were much disarrayed. Parton bent, and from beneath the bed took a tumbler of yellowish glass, which still contained a few drops of liquid. Beneath the small table at the bedside, protected from the water that had been hurled on the flames, was a covered pitcher of the same material, still half-full. The militia officer drew it out, sniffed at the contents and grimaced: “Frank?” he called to the man behind him. “What’s that smell like to you? And get Burgess in here, he’s an apothecary—”

  The man Frank handed his torch to Rose – she was the only one of the guests still in the room – and took the pitcher between his hands to breathe its contents: “Faugh! It’s laudanum.”

  “That’s what I thought.” Parton’s heavy face was grim. “Somebody dosed her good, then set the place afire. Damn sneakin’ niggers. They figured with all the white men in the district up in town tonight the place’d be burned to the ground before anybody knew what’d happened.” He stood, took the torch from Rose as another man, stringy and rat-gray, came in, presumably Burgess the apothecary.

  “Round ‘em up, Frank,” grated Lieutenant Parton. “Get the men out onto the roads and into the woods. Sure as gun’s iron, some of ‘em’ll have run off. How many niggers did Neuville have on the place? Fifty-three? This place got a jail on it? Faugh,” he added, at the news that the Marais jail consisted of a single cell. “Mr. Levesque, we’d be obliged if you’d lend us yours for the night. And you better count your own boys over, to make sure none of Neuville’s is tryin’ to pass himself off among ‘em. Or among your guests.”

  *

  “Well, really!” exploded Helène Passebon, when Rose related this last remark to the re-assembled guests in the Belle Jour parlor an hour later. “The very idea!”

  “Only an American,” fumed Odile Gignac the dressmaker, “would even think that field-hands – blacks! – could be mistaken by anybody for respectable colored—”

  She was certainly correct, reflected Rose, particularly given the fact that the Neuville slaves would be covered with dirt and sweat from trying to put out the fire in their master’s house. But then, so were many of the men who’d come from town for the birthday celebrations, and she could also understand why some of the slaves might try to lose themselves in the general crowd, once Lieutenant Parton arrived.

  While indignation frothed in the parlor and Arnaud Levesque’s butler and house-boy arranged the late supper into a buffet instead, Rose passed through the French door and out onto the back gallery. Her wet costume chilled her in the spring night, and she hugged closer the threadbare coat Hannibal had wrapped around her shoulders, with her blue-and-gold striped Egyptian head-dress drawn over it like a shawl.

  Levesque had left Crowdie Passebon – President of the Faubourg Tremé Free Colored Militia and Burial Society, and well known to almost every wealthy white man in New Orleans – in charge at Belle Jour, with Hannibal the fiddler as his second-in-command. Adorned himself in somebody’s pink-and-turquoise Norwich silk shawl, the feckless musician was nobody’s idea of a leader, but as the only white man present, his was the only testimony that would be accepted in a court of law (“That it should come to this!” trumpeted Agnes Pellicot in fury). Passebon had had cressets set up in the long, narrow yard between the rear wings of the house, and had assembled there every one of Arnaud Levesque’s slaves, from Jojo the foreman to old Granmere Lomie to the tiniest baby, presumably because not all members of the St. Bernard Parish militia could be trusted not to take advantage of confusion and darkness, and kidnap a slave for re-sale elsewhere and later.

  Levesque himself, Fortune Gerard, Vachel Corcet the attorney, and a handful of other men picked because they were attestably well-known to all members of the New Orleans City Council and business community, had remained at Ma
rais – sticking to one another like seeds in a cotton-boll, Rose was certain – to make sure that no free colored guest who had inadvertantly strayed from the bucket-lines would wander back to the scene of the fire and find himself thrust into the plantation slave-jail. Militiamen swarmed the woods between the two houses.

  She stood for a long time, looking out over the little community of the unfree, as they bedded down philosophically on their corn-shuck pallets on the ground.

  She knew what happened, when a slave murdered the master. What the penalty was.

  “Idiots.” Livia stepped out onto the gallery behind her. “Anybody in the parish can tell them who did it.” She was still attired as the Virgin Queen. Sensibly enough, Rose thought, considering that so clothed, nobody could possibly mistake her for anything but a guest at the Levesque masquerade. Muted reflections from the windows whispered in her galaxies of pearls. “For all the airs the girl gave herself, wailing about her poor Madame and how shocked Michie Jèrôme will be when he hears… hmpf!”

  “You mean the maid?” Rose hadn’t even been aware Livia had followed the crowd – a startling lacuna, considering her outfit.

  “Everyone from New Orleans to Jesuit’s Bend knows about Jèrôme Neuville buying Ariette for his wife’s maid and then taking her as his mistress. And Leonie had to sit still for it, that her hair was brushed and her wash-water fetched by the woman her husband was bulling. Not that Leonie Neuville deserves anyone’s pity, for a colder-hearted witch you’d go far to find. But what Neuville thought would be the end of it, if not this, I can’t imagine.”

  Rose shivered, and rubbed her arms beneath the shabby coat. “I wonder the woman didn’t take the first chance when her husband was absent, and get rid of the poor girl.”

  “You don’t know Jèrôme Neuville.”

  “It doesn’t sound like I want to.” Rose tried to keep her voice light, but her mother-in-law gave her a sidelong look from those dark, brilliant eyes.

  “No dealer with a mind to avoid a lawsuit is going to buy from a woman whose husband is away. Likely they know that situation all too well. I’m told Leonie had the little hussy whipped, the first time Neuville was from home, but when Neuville came home and heard of it, he whipped his wife for it himself, stroke for stroke, so there was nothing more heard of that. Since her land was all Mistress Leonie had to bring to the marriage, and it was her brother-in-law who sold this place to Arnaud before he took himself and the rest of the family off to Georgia – and why Pauline Giffleurs thought that marrying a jumped-up Irish American animal was a good idea in the first place I’ll never know! – Leonie has no one really to turn to. Their parents – hers and Pauline’s – were dead four years ago in the cholera, and neither of those girls would give a cup of water to the other or to anyone else to keep them from dying of thirst.”

  Livia shrugged, and Rose inwardly marvelled at her mother-in-law’s comprehensive command of the slightest and most recherché threads of gossip, not only in New Orleans but evidently for a considerable distance up and down the river.

  Still her mind returned to the charred-out oven of that bedroom, with the torchlight throwing her shadow before her. To the walls that were burned in some places and in others not, to the mattress that hadn’t taken fire – wool, probably – and the pillow that had, to the gray-and-lavender gown that lay so unrumpled over the dead woman’s legs, while her hands and face had been charred nearly to the bone. To the smell of sulfur, and of nitre.

  Below the gallery, the murmur of the slaves’ voices lowered, but did not altogether cease. A child cried and was hushed; Rose caught drifts of cane-patch French, so thick with African words that she couldn’t distinguish what was being said. Benjamin probably could, she reflected. Even so, she could guess what was being said. Beyond doubt, there were those among the Belle Jour hands who wived or husbanded “abroad” to those enslaved on Marais. Knowing the law in such cases, and aware – through whispered extrapolation of things seen and heard at Marais when the militia rode up – that laudanum had been found in the room, that the fire had been deliberately set.

  When a slave killed a master, the law was that all slaves of the household would die.

  *

  Candide Levesque was a little surprised at Rose’s request, but wrote out for her a “pass” for a slave to travel by night. “It is vital that word of the fire at Marais Plantation reach the proper authorities in New Orleans by morning.” Though she had never been a slave, for seven years she had lived on her white father’s tiny plantation on Grand Isle, and her best friend, Cora, had educated her in a wealth of detail about the things slaves had to put up with and watch out for.

  Gabriel volunteered to go, mounted on one of the Belle Jour riding-mules and openly wearing a tin slave-badge borrowed from Fortune Gerard’s valet, since the patrols – who knew pretty much everyone in the parish – wouldn’t have believed him if he’d said he was one of the Levesque slaves. “I don’t know where Lieutenant Shaw will be—” Rose named the only member of the New Orleans City Guard whose intelligence and integrity she had learned to trust. “But take my message to the Cabildo, and tell them there that it’s important. That a woman has been murdered in strange circumstances here, and that we need his judgement.”

  This was all, in fact, that her note to Shaw said, because she knew nothing further.

  Not yet.

  Her heart beat quickly at the thought of the militiamen who’d still be milling around Marais, guarding the slave-jail there as two of them were guarding the stout little brick building here, that lay just beyond the kitchen behind the Big House, into which the rest of the Marais slaves had been filed. But though Lieutenant Parton had impressed her as respectful – to a point – of the custom of the country regarding a free colored planter, she mistrusted the stubborn set of his mouth, and the surly resentment that glinted in his eyes.

  So as Arnaud Levesque’s house-slaves laid down pallets in the attic for the male guests, and distributed the satchels and carpetbags of the women among the bed-chambers and store-rooms of the house’s two wings, Rose followed the soft plunking of a banjo out onto the front gallery, and as she had expected found Hannibal experimentally picking out the largo of Vivaldi’s Lute Concerto in D. There wasn’t an instrument invented that the fiddler wouldn’t try to get music out of.

  “Athene swift descended from above,

  Sent by the sister and the wife of Jove….”

  He turned his head at the creak of the planking underfoot, and Rose smiled at his nickname for her. “I saw someone who looked suspiciously like Gabriel ride out of here a few minutes ago – I hope you have plans to explain to Benjamin how it will come that we’ll be obliged to buy him out of prison…”

  “He has a pass,” said Rose. “Also a slave-badge.”

  “Ad tristem partem strenua suspicio.” He made to set the banjo aside. “It isn’t my business, of course, but might he not be safer by daylight?”

  “By daylight,” returned Rose, “that idiot militia lieutenant will have rummaged around in what’s left of Leonie Neuville’s bedroom and trampled to pieces whatever there is to be seen.”

  In the shadow of the gallery Hannibal was little more than a blur, yet still she saw the lift of his mobile eyebrows. “And what is there to be seen?”

  “I won’t know that ‘til I see it.”

  *

  Rose fed Baby John, and changed from her assortment of Biblical bedsheets into the striped skirt and stiffened canvas work-bodice – not to mention stouter shoes – that she’d brought in a carpet-bag for going home in. She lay for a time in the shuttered darkness of one of the spare bed-chambers beside Zizi-Marie, listening to the other women guests gossipping softly in the room next door:

  “Well, of course it was the maid Ariette! And the way Leonie Neuville treated her it’s no wonder!”

  “Served her right, for lying with Neuville, and in M’am Neuville’s own house, too!”

  “She must have thought the poison in that pitch
er would be destroyed in the fire…”

  Rose remembered the girl’s face, streaming with tears in the firelight. Madame, oh, Madame…

  And who knows if Hagar in the Bible had any enthusiasm for the job when Sarah “gave her to her husband” that the younger woman might provide the old man with sons?

  When the voices fell silent she tucked the blankets more firmly around her son, then slipped from the bed, and, shoes in hand, padded out to the gallery again. The moon was just past full, the sky blotched with cloud. A pair of militiamen rode past on the river road, patrolling for runaway slaves. From the blackness of the gallery Hannibal’s light, scratchy voice murmured, “You come most carefully upon your hour,” and Rose smelled the acrid harshness of hot metal from a shaded dark-lantern.

  “Did you notice anything odd at Marais this evening?” asked Rose softly, as they descended the gallery steps. “Anything about the fire?”

  “Other than the fact that it took a woman’s life?” He shivered. “I wasn’t in the room. How the girl thought she’d get away with it, since apparently everyone in the parish knows her relations with the master—”

  “Yes.” Rose twisted the night-time braid of her hair up onto the crown of her head, and fished in her pockets for a comb to hold it in place. After a moment Hannibal, who borrowed such articles from his lady-friends for his own use, disentangled one from his own long hair and held it out to her. “Thank you—If the girl Ariette had indeed poisoned her mistress, and set that fire, why would she have stayed?”

  “To throw people off the scent? Parton’s got half an army of men on the roads and in the woods, I doubt anyone could get away from the house tonight.”